Lots of things are legal that are not OK, lying and cheating for example.

Helen

The act of criminalizing behavior, and the ethics of that behavior are distinct issues for good reason. Partly because a reason of ethics is a poor reason to criminalize a behavior. It is a weird concept, but important if you want society to function rather than tear itself apart.

Specific ethics vary from person to person, and they evolve over time. And many ethics have little to do with how well the society functions at the large scale. Codifying too much of that into law is a recipe for a dogmatic, irrational, and dysfunctional society/government.

But here's the thing, lying and cheating can pose a problem to society. Specifically when it is easy to go back on your word in a business deal with no recourse. Thus, we include the legal concept of a contract that is enforced by civil courts. So while we don't criminalize the behavior, we make it possible to address the harm the behavior causes to society.

Copyright infringement started out purely as a civil offense, rather than criminal. I'm not a fan of how it has been made into a criminal offense. I believe the protections afforded under copyright fall under the same category that contract law provides. Not the same protections that criminal law is meant to provide.

My last link notes that some forms of copyright infringement became, in 1982, in the US, felonies. That's way harsher than is wise. When laws are so harsh, against offenses so common, they aren't enforced. Make it like a parking ticket. Give the kingpins probation.

What country who prints currency does not by definition manipulate currency? All countries should therefore be suspect, as well as their legislative decisions, it is only logical.

This book can only be sold in the country where it was bought? lol, what an archaic notion.

I'm not really sure how tariffs and devaluing one's currency to make exports more palatable have anything to do with the topic at hand here. Beyond maybe the fact that currencies are of inequal value, and regions have inequal costs of living, creating the situation of arbitrage that took place here. Ending currency manipulation will not end that, ending tariffs won't end that, and tariffs do still provide a useful service that has nothing to do with the issue at hand.

Archaic notion? Maybe. Reality? Yes. The problem here is that you don't have a world government, world currency or really any organization at that level which can properly level the playing field. Each nation has different laws. Each nation has tariffs on imports (see Brazil's 100% tariffs making Foxconn build plants there to bypass it). As long as you have all these different sovereign nations with their own idea of what is moral and legal behavior, you cannot get a truly global economy. At least not one that is less neurotic than what we have now. If you haven't realized how neurotic the global economy is by now, you haven't worked at a company that operates internationally, or have been ignoring the economy section of the newspaper for the last 50 years.

I'm not really sure how tariffs and devaluing one's currency to make exports more palatable have anything to do with the topic at hand here. Beyond maybe the fact that currencies are of inequal value, and regions have inequal costs of living, creating the situation of arbitrage that took place here. Ending currency manipulation will not end that, ending tariffs won't end that, and tariffs do still provide a useful service that has nothing to do with the issue at hand.

Archaic notion? Maybe. Reality? Yes. The problem here is that you don't have a world government, world currency or really any organization at that level which can properly level the playing field. Each nation has different laws. Each nation has tariffs on imports (see Brazil's 100% tariffs making Foxconn build plants there to bypass it). As long as you have all these different sovereign nations with their own idea of what is moral and legal behavior, you cannot get a truly global economy. At least not one that is less neurotic than what we have now. If you haven't realized how neurotic the global economy is by now, you haven't worked at a company that operates internationally, or have been ignoring the economy section of the newspaper for the last 50 years.

At least we recognize what the problem is, if the global economy is insane, aren't those who continue to allow it to function crazy as well??

At least we recognize what the problem is, if the global economy is insane, aren't those who continue to allow it to function crazy as well??

Again, you keep missing my key point here, and inserting different words that don't mean what I say.

Neurotic != insane, and was a form of hyperbole to refer to how twitchy nations are in the global economy.

The point I keep making and that you routinely ignore is that nobody is "allowing" the global economy to function. Nobody has any level of control over it. Nations try to control their piece of it, and the differences that make the global economy look neurotic are due to cultural differences as well as differences in the local situation.

You can't just "fix" culture so that it is all the same and reshape whole economies to "fix" local situations. It's not realistic to believe that can just be done. Not when these different cultures look at each other and ask themselves "Why do they do that?"